05/08/2012

trees with roots

Last weekend Junebug and I took a trip to Baldwin Brook Farm, located about an hour from our house. It was our turn to pick up the milk, eggs, yogurt and cream for our "milky milk" group here in Providence: a dozen or so families who have organized ourselves to rotate picking up our bi-weekly dairy orders from the farm and bringing them back to the city.

We each have our own reasons for participating in this effort. For me, it's a priority to teach my kids where their food comes from. Not just through books and stories, but through their own experiences. My daughter Junebug's namesake -- my maternal great-grandmother -- was a farmer. She prefered the company of open fields, big sky, cows, and chickens on the flat Ohio land where she lived. She hated wearing shoes. She married my great-grandpa George, who owned the furniture store "in town." When he entertained business clients at their home, the thing she hated most was that she had to put on shoes.

My family, like many of our familes, has moved away from the land. The first step was the furniture store, which later became a hardware store that my grandfather owned and operated. The next step was my mother, who grew up in that same farm house as her mother but then left to attend college in Columbus. She never moved back. She traveled, she married my father, a native Californian. My brother and I grew up in the suburbs of Sacramento where the milk and eggs in our fridge came from the grocery store.

My family is a fine example of American upward mobility, that specific type of class mobility made possible by hard work, ambition and, certainly, white privilege. We've spent the last several generations trying to get the dirt out from under our fingernails. To make something more important of ourselves. And wouldn't my ancestors be proud that their children's children have Master's degrees, careers, and live in big homes in the city with multiple bathrooms? Isn't this what all parents dream for our children: that they will take what we can provide and use it to do something better?

And yet.

What does that even really mean?

What is more important than knowing how to grow food from the land? Than knowing hard work and how to be grounded in one place long enough to figure something out about it?

I am grateful that, growing up, I had milk and eggs at all, not to mention a fridge to put them in. And I am also grateful that although my mom went to college, and then to California, and while she had a successful career and a suburban home with multiple bathrooms, she also had a garden where I learned to pick beans and marvel at the dew drops on spider webs. And she valued long summer visits to my grandma's house in Ohio, the same one that George built, where we would roughhouse with my cousins and sit on the front porch to experience swelling, humid thunderstorms rolling overhead (a miraculous novelty for kids from California). And she also taught me that where you come from is as important as where you're going. A tree without roots will only grow top-heavy and blow over in the wind.

My people are farming people. And while I did not grow up as a farming person myself, that doesn't mean my children might not be.

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Welcome

Greetings from Providence! I'm Jennifer, working mom of twins + 1. I'm also a writer, educator, activist, seeker, aspiring photographer and maker of things. I juggle multiple realities all the time and this is where I share about it. Thanks for stopping by!